“the mad road
driving men ahead
The raw cut,
the drag,
the butte,
the star,
he draw,
the sunflower in the grass…
ditches by the side of the road
O can se a bug playing in the grass
The crazed voyageur
of the lone automobile
presses forth his eager insignificance
in noseplates and licenses
into the vast promise of life –
the choice of tragic wives.
telephone poles
toothpick time
the mad road
driving men ahead
the mad road”
All those words are Jack Kerouac’s. I claim none of them, I choose these from The Book, for their match to my trip the closest and most poetic when together. So the arrangement is mine and it belongs here but know that these are not mine and they belong to my hero, Jack Kerouac.
we leave now and didn’t sleep enough last night. We should have made love but we allowed tiredness and the unceasing need of sleep to dissuade us.
bad decision.
today’s meditation is this. All religion lends itself to leaders more bent of terror than love and peace. My belief is no different.
1995: AUM subway attack
Top leaders of AUM Shinrikyo (Japanese: “AUM Supreme Truth”), a Japanese Buddhist sect founded in 1987 by Asahara Shoko, released nerve gas into a Tokyo subway this day in 1995, killing 12 people and injuring thousands.
This ignores all the precepts. This ignores everything I’ve ever read. This isn’t what I practice.
I practice poetry. I study to be a buddha and know how imperfect I am. I am a terrible example.
now two non-haiku –
The great Zen patriarchs are
painted with beards;
Whether they are frozen in snow
or begging for alms.
– I wrote this
Always time, all
illusion, a phantom or dream
already passing.
– this one too.
Have a great weekend.
– Jhon
the platitudes of willful resemblance 